If there’s one thing I’ve never done in the past it was 100% Final Fantasy X. Well, I still haven’t 100%’d it, but who said you needed to for the platinum? It’s time to recount my experience of getting the platinum trophy for Final Fantasy X HD Remaster!
This journey began back when I got the Japanese version as a Christmas present. I’ve played through Final Fantasy X a lot, though as I said I had never actually completed it 100% before, so playing it in Japanese wasn’t all that tough. Playing on the Japanese version helped me get a bunch of trophies to start off with. Mainly the story related trophies, though I did get some extra ones.
The first one I can recall was going for the 5 chests with the chocobo trophy. Getting this trophy required a lot of particular planning for the route and hoping that the opponent didn’t get just ahead of you and kill the run. After many retries, I finally got the right path down and claimed the trophy. And it was also one I never went to do again in English because it was not fun at all.
Another trophy I got on this version was the Magus Sisters. The Magus Sisters have never really been that hard to get, though as this is the International version you do need to be careful. Namely, you need to make sure that you get the Destruction Sphere rewards from Macalania and Besaid Temples. On that note, you should also make sure to grab the chest in Yunalesca’s room before leaving Zanarkand. This is, of course, because of the fact Dark Aeons exist. In particular, Valefor blocks off Besaid, Shiva blocks off Macalania Temple, and Bahamut blocks off the chest in Yunalesca’s room.
Fast forward to the English version. This is where the long grind came in, at some points quite literally. Since I had earned a few trophies that weren’t required for Penance on the Japanese version I was able to skip them. Of course, I still had all of the painful trophies remaining: blitzball, lightning dodging, the sphere grid, and Penance. Well, okay, I sort of cheated out with lightning dodging as someone else did it for me, so we can take that one off the list. I also had to find all of the Al Bhed Primers and Jyscal Spheres, which was a combination of making sure I got the primers out of Home and having to kill a Dark Aeon to get both a primer and a sphere.
One of the worst trophies for me was trying to do the Chocobo Race with the Trainer in under 0.0 seconds. Not only was it a trophy but I had to do it to complete Tidus’ weapon. This trophy took several hours of attempts, including a lot of swearing and wanting to throw my controller out the window. After the run finally happened though, I rejoiced because I knew I would never have to do it again. No, please don’t remind me that I’ll need to do it again whenever I get back to working on my Tidus solo. Please, just don’t remind me of that fact.
Around the time I started working a bit more towards actually trying to get this platinum the PS4 version came out. I was at the point of being between blitzball and able to kill Dark Valefor to try and get a Ribbon armour out of her. Of course, I went for this (at first) on the PS4 version. It turned out this was a gigantic mistake, seeing as the RNG was absolutely broken and she would never actually drop one unless I pushed the RNG forward through thousands of battles (at least presumably that would work, I never tested it that much). Back to the PS3 version I went!
After finally getting the Ribbon off of Valefor, I got the rest of my Al Bhed Primers and Jyscal Spheres. I also dived headlong back into blitzball. Now, I don’t really mind blitzball all that much, but boy was I ever glad to finish it this time. Trophy-wise, all you really need to do is get the Auroch Reels. Dark Aeon and Penance sanity wise, you want to go a step further and complete Wakka’s World Champion.
With the completed World Champion in hand, I set out to complete my creature captures. I actually took down a few more Dark Aeons before I finished the World Champion (Ifrit, Ixion, and Shiva), but that isn’t the point here. I needed to finish creatures for a few reasons: I needed to kill Nemesis and I needed to farm stats for the rest of the Aeons.
I was actually surprised at how easy Nemesis was. I was no where near done with grinding out my stats (to be fair, I had most of the main ones done) and had just been going through all the fights in the Arena to try and clear them off. In fact, going into the fight I had pretty much no strategy and sort of just ended up winning. It was my first time taking him down too, so it was definitely a surprise. Well, that’s one more trophy down! Now if only it wasn’t the worst trophies left…
Worst trophies remaining, part 1: finish the Sphere Grid on everyone. Every, single, node. Thankfully, you don’t really need to wipe out the +1 stat nodes to take down everything, though you do want to wipe the +1 Luck nodes. Luck and Fortune spheres are just hell to actually farm so you really want to have as few as possible. The goal for luck was to hit 130 on my main party. I also made a split off save after I had finished farming for those spheres so that I didn’t need to activate all of the nodes on everyone for the trophy, only for my save that was going to head for Penance.
Finishing the Sphere Grid is what forced me to take a lot of extended breaks from the game. Once I finally got down to it though, I powered it out in two days. If you have the determination (and something to listen to or watch) then it is about 10% less painful. It’s still really painful to do though, and I now absolutely despise that Sphere Grid. It is just awful and the fact the platinum asked for a person to complete it on everyone… Never again.
After the Sphere Grid was done, one major task remained: Penance. I had four Dark Aeons left to slay to even make it to him. While for the first half I went in with no strategy, this time I had a strategy for each. I needed one, especially with Dark Bahamut’s counter attack pattern. Because of Anima I ended up making a second Ribbon armour since I didn’t get another drop for my team from anything else before her. I made it for Wakka, though unfortunately it still doesn’t block against Curse. I just dealt with the fact Tidus got doomed though and just had Stoneproof on him. All four of these Aeons took around 20 minutes each to slay: Yojimbo because he had 5 forms, the Sisters because Mindy just likes to evade (and no, it is NOT worth it to farm more Luck for her), Bahamut because of how his Impulse counter attack worked, and Anima because she just had a lot of HP. At last, with all four down, it was time for the big boy: Penance.
Penance… was, well, surprisingly easy. Thanks to Bahamut I knew how to count to 5, and Penance really puts you to the test on counting your hits. You don’t want him to get a turn during his second phase while both arms out, and the best way to counter this is to stagger their deaths. Since all of your hits will deal 99,999, it takes 6 hits to kill one arm. So, as I said, it was a matter of staggering their deaths and then one would never be alive. Of course, Penance is also a matter of having the correct equipment made for your team. Really though, I was surprised at the fact he really wasn’t that hard, and after he fell, the final two trophies came up: Perseverance and Completion.
Final Fantasy X HD’s platinum is just a giant matter of patience and being good at lightning dodging. You don’t even need to do all of the mini-games for the platinum either, so unless you really want Kimahri on your team, you don’t even need to touch those silly butterflies. Past that, as I said, it’s just a matter of patience. The Sphere Grid trophy is absolute torture and is one you are very happy when it’s done. The Dark Aeons take strategy to take down, as does Penance, but they are nothing compared to finishing the Sphere Grid. If you plan to go for this platinum, just be prepared for a lot of grinding for stats and sphere levels. I was ready and still came out hating the Sphere Grid in the end.
Final Fantasy X HD Remaster Platinum Difficulty
4.5/5
Hey, at least the butterfly mini-game isn’t required for the platinum!
